Volume 24, Number 1 · February 3, 1977
Know It All
By Anthony Quinton
The New Columbia Encyclopedia
edited by William H. Harris, edited by Judith S. Levey
Columbia University Press, 3,052 pp., $79.50
Who needs an encyclopedia of over 3,000 pages, some 324 cubic inches (or about a fifth of a cubic foot) in volume, and containing more than six-and-a-half million words? The answer must be: everyone who is strong enough to lift it or to sustain its considerable weight on his lap without serious interference to the circulation of the blood. For everyone is from time to time in need of information not readily retrievable from the memories of his immediate domestic or social circle, the telephone book, or the dictionary. Such an aid to knowledge will be of the greatest value as long as that variety of human temperament persists which believes that questions of simple fact can be settled by pure, and usually noisy, argument. It serves, at the very least, as a practicing empiricist's shelter from the fallout of misplaced reasoning.
Review, 1947 words
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